Getting Started with Sitemason 6

Sitemason 6 is a reinvention of our flagship content management platform. The development of Sitemason 6 is our attempt to bring all our robust features under a single roof. One interface to manage all of your content on any device.

Core Concepts

Sitemason 6 is extremely intuitive. We feel it's an interface that speaks for itself, however there are some basic concepts that may be helpful for new users.

The Sitemason Tools

Content comes in all shapes and sizes. Sitemason offers a suite of tools tailor made for managing your various content. The Sitemason tools generate a multitude of page types including simple Pages, News, Calendar, Gallery, Store, Forms, and also the ability to create Custom pages. Read more about our suite of tools for managing content.

An example of the tool types available to manage your website pages in Sitemason.

Content Panels

Content is represented hierarchically as panels in the interface, with child panels sliding over their parent. For example, an article content panel slides over its parent list of News articles. Or a simple Page panel slides over its parent Site list. A visual example of an article over a list of news items can be seen here:

Lists

The Site and some tools contain lists of items. For example, a News tool is a list of articles, or a Site is a list of page building tools, etc. From the list, you can manipulate multiple items or select a single item to edit its details.

An example of a hierarchical site list of pages in the Sitemason CMS

Tabs

Tabs are represented on the right hand side of panels, offering supporting content to the current panel. For example, Tags for an article or Subscriptions to a list are managed from Tabs.

Supporting Tabs on the right side of a News tool to manage articles, tags, etc.

Actions

An Action is any function that affects the list through a set of buttons displayed above the content panel. Adding a page, Deleting an article, Exporting your data, or Searching your content are all considered Actions.

Available Actions in a Site Panel

Managing Content

When you first signup for Sitemason, you will be dropped into your account where you'll have a fully functional website using all of our available tools. Example content has been added to each and you can Preview any page by selecting "Preview" from the detail view or Shorctut Gear.

Adding Content

The Sitemason tools are the construction blocks of your site. To add pages to your website, select "Add" from the Action bar in the Site panel. For starters, select a simple Page. Give your new page a Title and Path, then select the location in the Site list where you'd like the page to live. If no location is selected, your page will be added to the bottom of the list. Select "Create", and you will have a new page on your website. Once a new page has been added, select its title in the list, and a content panel will open ready to start creating content.

Organizing Navigation

The Sitemason platform abides by SEO best practice of adhering to a structured hierarchy for site content. Just like every computer uses folders, sub-folders, and files, Sitemason expects content to follow a similar organization. To manage the site structure, select "Reorder" from the Action bar. You can then drag & drop to reorganize your site navigation. Select "Include in Navigation" from page settings or the item's Shortcut Gear to add to the site's navigation menu.

Site Switching

If you manage more than one site within Sitemason, you can easily navigate between multiple sites by using the Site Switching menu in the top left of the interface. You can also view your development URL if your site is undergoing a redesign.

An example of switching between multiple websites in one account.

Next Steps

From here, we invite you to play around in your Sitemason account, and consult our forums for additional help. In particular, a good next step is to read through the documentation to see how much is possible with the Sitemason platform. For questions pertaining to the display of your website, please read the Site Templates overview.

Hi James, the form tool isn't available yet for Sitemason 6. The Form tool in its current state only works with SM4 and SM5 template versions. Could you please email support@sitemason.com to open a discussion about form options for your account?